election

This is delicate and I will be scrupulously neutral in these paragraphs so as to offend no one, but I thought it would be fun to attempt an interpretation of the current political climate from the perspective and sensibilities of CRM. Can this really work? You be the judge. This will be different from any other analysis you might have come across because I do not wish to discuss candidates. I am all about the customer.

There are two CRM issues that inform politics this year and I have written about both—empowering the customer in Solve for the Customer—and engaging the customer to produce loyalty which I write about in my new book, You Can’t Buy Customer Loyalty, But You Can Earn It (available in May). First empowerment.

It has been said so often that it is a cliché of our times that the power in most vendor-customer relationships has transitioned from vendors to customers thanks to the ubiquity of the Internet and social communities that readily share information, often cutting out the vendor in the process. This is not precisely what’s been going on in politics because, as a free society we’ve always had an abundance of information, at least in theory, through a free press.

But in reality, until cable news appeared and the innumerable web outlets for every viewpoint, much was left unexplored because of space limitations in newspapers or time limits for newscasts thus information was held closely with some cooperation from the fourth estate. You need look back no further than the nature of scandals of the last several decades and compare them to the kiss and tell histories of earlier times to know that many opportunities to show political leaders had feet of clay were in olden times avoided.

So political customers, like people in every other aspect of life, have become empowered with information they never expected to have even a generation ago. This abundance of information has not served the political process very well based on this cycle but not because transparency is bad. Information has now shown that the political practitioners have for some time turned a blind eye to their customers. They have ceased to be engaged at precisely the same time that technology has made engagement more commonplace in almost every other aspect of life.

The failure to engage can now be seen clearly in the vitriol that the electorate express for establishment politicians. In issue after issue, one side or another has campaigned with promises to do better or to fix something and then failed to deliver. In the most non-controversial example I can find, the rising American living standard driven by increasing productivity in the workplace, has been replaced by a stagnation or outright decline that is well documented and keenly felt throughout the working and middle classes. This is analogous to a vendor repeatedly missing an opportunity to meet a customer’s needs in a moment of truth. Such a repeated failure is lethal both to vendors and politicians.

The customer response has been a form of populism that expresses itself differently depending on one’s position on opposite sides of the political divide. Worse, in many cases, the establishment’s response is a tone-deaf attempt to bring voters back with still further promises of future benefits.

It’s as if a customer has returned to a store with a defective product and all the vendor can think of doing is to offer a big discount on a future purchase. In the CRM world, when these tactics have been tried, customers have often gone bananas. You need only survey sentiment sites or search for your favorite company while appending the word “sucks” to see the lingering effect.

Solutions for the political process are analogous to repairing the vendor-customer relationship. First, acknowledge the problem and validate the customer. This means listening more than talking or marketing which is very hard to do once a live election is underway. But until you’ve listened you might not understand what needs to be fixed and you won’t have the credibility to make the attempt in any event. It’s easier to do this in business.

The next step is to quickly transition from diagnosis to prescription. This is also difficult, but not impossible, because it involves revising the traditional political scripts, which mostly deal with old pieties and not with specifics. It is complicated by the fact that at this point short attention span customers want actions and not plans, but such is the nature of elections.

Business is fortunate in that elections happen every day—customers buy or they don’t, they engage or give up on you, but if you lose a relationship, you aren’t out of it totally. Each new day is a chance in business to get it right with no need to wait until after an election which can be months in the future. Politicians should be so lucky.

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Beagle Research Group, LLC is a CRM analyst firm founded in 2004. We perform market research for vendors and advise end users in CRM selection, deployment and use. We also publish a steady stream of analysis on many of the industry’s most popular topics as well as emerging trends. For example, one of our core pursuits is researching emerging companies to understand current innovation trends. This research informs the advice we give our clients and readers.